In the impossibly tiny confines of an art space on the border of Exposition Park, a group sits on a large blanket made of several pairs of pants. The 30 quiet attendees gather in the gallery known as the Reading Room on a recent frigid Saturday. A recording of the jazz standard "Caravan" plays softly.

Listen carefully and it becomes apparent that the backing percussion is not a typical jazz drummer. It's someone pounding together the ingredients for a batch of tortillas. Elsewhere in the layers of the mixed-up soundtrack, the summer trill of the common cicada is heard.

Artist Francis Almendárez has turned the Reading Room into a family gathering for the opening of his show "The Potential Wanderer," curated by Caroline Elbaor. The show continues through March 2.

While Almendárez's art deals very much with his own history, everyone is invited to experience it.

"I wanted to make a tapestry where people could come and sit down on and be able to touch," Almendárez says. "Not treat it so sacred. With a lot of artwork you can't touch it or get too close to it. I want to break away from that. But at the same time you know it is a work of art. I like to have that effect -- that people could interact with it and sit with it and look at the other work in that space while sitting on it."

Installation by artist Francis Almendárez at "The Potential Wanderer," curated by Caroline Elbaor, at the Reading Room in Dallas. On the floor is a large blanket made of several pairs of pants.

(The Reading Room)

The blanket is positioned between three monitors broadcasting images captured during Almendárez’s journeys. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and relocated to Houston in 2013. As if that weren't enough of a culture shock, he then attended Goldsmiths University of London.

England “made me appreciate my culture, my Latin-ness, my music at home, my food, my family," Almendárez says. "I went out there and didn't know a single person. But then being out there on my own helped me grow as a human being."

It was London where Almendárez met Elbaor, a Dallas native now on the curatorial staff at the Dallas Contemporary, and everything changed for both of them.

"I still remember our first meeting," Elbaor says. "It tugs on my heartstrings. ... I can remember immediately feeling connected to him; not only to his work, but also as a friend."

The Reading Room show is their third collaboration; they previously worked together on exhibitions in Hamburg, Germany and London.

TOP: Artist Francis Almendárez (Photo by Nan Coulter). BOTTOM: Part of his exhibition "The Potential Wanderer" (Photo by Kevin Todora)

(The Reading Room)

Almendárez's work deals with labor issues on a spectrum both autobiographical and painfully universal. While literature provided by the gallery refers to him as a "second-generation immigrant,” there is a willful coyness to the mystery of place and personhood in the artist's work.

Almendárez continually blurs the context so that the images on the screen could take place anywhere. He mentions it's a tribute to his grandmother's time as a seamstress, but the stitching in the work pants on the floor could have been made by a seamstress in any factory, to be worn by workers everywhere. He refuses to say which skyline is shown in one video, although it looks to be in the United States. "A city in the West," he says. Almendárez will divulge only that a shot of the sea is "in the Caribbean" or that another building is somewhere "in Central America."

"I don't want to be too specific about location," Almendárez says. "I want to leave that open for the audience member to have their own take on it. And possibly even insert themselves into this narrative that I've constructed."

When Almendárez finally recites his poem on the blanket after enough visitors accept his invitation to sit, the blunt edges of his words threaten to shatter the placidity of his imagery, both maritime and cityscape alike:

"Clock in

Clock out

40 hours this week

Maybe 15 hours the next

At your disposal and your pleasure

Until pronounced too slow, too old, ugly and/or useless

Laid off and obsolescent

This is our reality

This is the legacy we face generation after generation

How do we break from this cycle of unemployment, homelessness, dislocation and surmounting debt?"

For Almendárez, the message is deeply personal, but also a shared situation. "It's not just in my family history, because these are all experiences of my family, but other people," he says. "I had neighbors that lost their houses when the market crashed. They got sick and they got laid off or they just got laid off, period, because the company can't afford to have them full-time because they need to provide health care for them or things like that.

"Everything that they worked for, they've been loyal to a company for a certain number of years, and all of a sudden -- they're just let go of. That messes up the rest of their lives, their kid's lives. It just ripples. It's not just Latino families. It's all over the country. The working class."